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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 317

Part of Session 133: Ethnicity, Language and Culture in a Post-Soviet Multi-Ethnic City (Other abstracts in this session)

Language removal and identity formation in the linguistic landscapes of Nagorno-Karabakh

Authors: Muth, Sebastian
Submitted by: Muth, Sebastian (Universität Greifswald, Germany)

The disintegration of the Soviet Union resulted in major demographic shifts and drew new boundaries in a once physically borderless region. Especially the South Caucasus, an area that has always been characterized by its linguistic diversity witnessed one of the most destructive interethnic wars on the territory of the former USSR, the Nagorno-Karabakh War that lasted from 1988 until 1994. Fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh located in Soviet Azerbaijan, it caused the lives of roughly 30,000 people and resulted in the removal of the Azeri population from the area. Two decades later the political status of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic remains unresolved, but apparently a new linguistic self-identity of the population takes shape. While possibilities for extensive sociolinguistic research in the area are limited, linguistic landscape research provides insights into patterns of individual and public language use. This presentation analyzes the linguistic landscapes of urban Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh and establishes functional domains of the languages visible. The discussion is backed up by a corpus of approximately 500 signs surveyed in September 2011 in a predetermined area of the inner city. Furthermore, it traces remnants of an Azeri linguistic landscape in abandoned settlements throughout Nagorno-Karabakh and documents patterns of language use in rural parts of the territory. Information on the present demographic situation suggest an overwhelming majority of 95 percent Armenians, yet both our quantitative and discursive observations point towards a bilingual language situation that includes both Armenian and – to a large extent – Russian as a language of prestige and wider communication. On the other hand the study shows the link between the removal of Azeri language from the public sphere and the eradication of Azeri culture in general.